Fresh Air
by sesquipedality
Summary: Angela's almost thirty and not exactly content when she hears an oddly familiar famous musician being interviewed on the radio. Then she bumps into an old boyfriend while home for Thanksgiving and suddenly Jordan Catalano is everywhere she turns.
1. On the Radio

I don't own _Fresh Air_ or Terry Gross. WNYC and Lehgih Valley Public Radio are real, and those are their actual broadcast times. I also don't own _Cyrano_. And obviously, _My So Called Life_ does not belong to me.

**Chapter 1: On the Radio**

In high school, especially after she became friends with Rayanne and Ricky, Angela sometimes felt ridiculously bourgeois and naive in her privilege. Now the teenagers on her caseload race through her radio presets in search of rap or hip hop and tease her for being such a yuppie, but Angela only laughs. She _is_ a (not so) Young Urban Professional, and she _likes_ NPR. Therefore, when the music station segues into yet another commercial break, she flips towards the lower end of the dial.

At home WNYC rebroadcasts _Fresh Air_ at 7pm and Angela listens to it over dinner. Apparently Lehigh Valley Public Radio does it at noon because that's Terry Gross's voice saying "let's play it now--" and a moment later a song starts. It's weirdly familiar. This isn't the indy pop that Angela prefers, and it's a class above the Top Forty hits that seem to blast in every store, so she can't imagine why it feels as though she's heard the artist before. When the music ends Terry begins questioning her interviewee about his experience growing up with dyslexia.

Dyslexia makes Angela think of her Uncle Neil. She's looking forward to seeing her father's younger brother on this visit home, and hopes she'll have time to actually talk with him. Tomorrow the Chases are cooking Thanksgiving dinner for eleven. Any moment not occupied with chopping, stirring, eating, or doing dishes will certainly be monopolized by Neil's eight-year-old twins.

The man (why does his voice sound so _familiar_?) explains that for a long time he and everyone he knew thought he was stupid because he couldn't read. He was actually held back twice, until his high school girlfriend signed him up for tutoring and he realized that he simply had a learning disability. He'd worked hard to build up his vocabulary after that, and fallen in love with complex words, which Terry says really shines through in his lyrics. Jordan Catalano, Angela thinks, I wonder if things have turned out half as well for Jordan Ca-- and then she must be going crazy because Terry Gross is saying "--talano, from _4.2 Light Years to Alpha Centauri_, after the break."

Angela slams the radio off in the middle of the show's list of sponsors-- "National Endowment for the Arts--" and plunges into memories.

***

They'd gotten back together after the Sex-with-Rayanne thing and their surreal attempt at emulating Edmund Rostand's most famous play. It'd been good for a while. When Angela thinks back, however, she can remember there being a _lot_ of things contributing to their eventual breakup. She'd forgiven him for sleeping with Rayanne, but neither of them had forgotten it, and his guilt and her suspicion stood between them. By the start of senior year she was seriously focused on getting into college and he manifestly wasn't. He was jaded and she was naive and the sex, when they'd finally started having it, wasn't actually all that great (she didn't have an orgasm until halfway through her first year at university). The haystack that smashed the camel's spine, however, was her dad admitting that he was having an affair with Hallie Lowenthal, his restaurant partner.

Angela had looked at Jordan's home-life, with his missing mom and his occasionally abusive alcoholic of a father, and thought that in comparison her family, even with the addition of Graham's infidelity, wasn't something she could complain about. Which basically just resulted in her being upset and him feeling irritated at his inability to do anything about it. And then Rayanne, who was working part time at the restaurant, turned out to be really supportive. The two girls' move back toward friendship only made Jordan awkward. Eventually all of the tension had exploded into one of Angela and Jordan's rare but blistering fights and she'd cried herself to sleep. When he came by her house the next day to talk things through they'd ended up agreeing that breaking up, rather than making up, was probably the best solution.

And that had been that.

After their first pseudo-relationship had ended he'd opened her locker and she'd done his homework and there'd been all sorts of unfinished business between them. The second time, even though it'd been mutual and necessary and things were utterly and completely over between them (maybe... maybe because they were utterly and completely over), it hurt to look at him. By Christmas her parents were trying to make things work and Graham had moved back home, but Jordan and Angela didn't talk at all.

Rayanne heard through Tino that Jordan was planning to move to California after school let out to try to make it in the music scene (he figured he could work on cars until he broke through) and if he wanted to know where Angela was going to college he just had to look her up in the graduation program. It would be a lie to say she hadn't thought of him since then, because she had, occasionally, when she reminisced about high school or saw a red convertible or broke up with her latest boyfriend, but it had been thirteen years.

* * *

_PLEASE review. This is a small fandom; if you don't no one will! Constructive criticism is especially appreciated but even a "this is cool" or "this sucks" would be great. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. Also, I'm looking for a beta (this is my first try at a real chaptered work and I'm not sure if I can do it)._


	2. Sound

**Chapter 2: Sound**

Except for the swish of the wheels and the rush of other cars Angela spends the rest of the ride to Three Rivers encased in silence. Her ipod was stolen on the subway last week and she barely owns any cds. She doesn't want to listen to the radio.

It's completely irrational, but the thought of hearing the rest of Jordan's interview feels like an invasion of privacy. Everything Jordan said was for the whole nation to hear, but she is the high school ex-girlfriend who apparently set him on his path to literacy, and he didn't know that _she_ would be listening.

***

A barrage of noise greets Angela as she opens the door to her childhood home. The cuisinart in the kitchen and Lillian, her four-month-old niece, are competing with each other for dominance. It's three years since Danielle got married and six since she started dating her future husband but even with Lillian's screaming red face as proof Angela still has trouble rapping her mind around the fact that _Brian Krakow _is her brother-in-law.

Angela has vague memories of Danielle's puppy-like childhood crush on Brian but she'd just assumed that eventually her sister grew out of it. That was Danielle for you, though, patience and determination and cunning all wrapped up in a frighteningly unobtrusive package, a girl that could like a boy when she was ten and come back from her freshman year of college determined to catch him.

Brian had drifted around for a few years after he graduated from university, not really settled on anything, and then, with rent money more dear than he'd been expecting, moved back home to live with his parents until he knew what the next step was. Well, he didn't know it then but the next step was living right across the street.

Danielle must have spent every minute of those first weeks of summer "sunbathing" on the lawn, displaying her long brown legs to the world and just waiting for Brian to pass so she could embroil him in conversation. Soon she was inviting him in for a glass of her dad's lemonade (it's so _hot_ and _thirsty _today), borrowing books from him as fast as he could reference them (and she didn't just _return _them, she discussed them and discussed them and laid her hand on his arm every chance she got), bringing him up to her bedroom to listen to the weird arty cds her friends at school had burned for her (and she sat right next to him on the bed while the music played, her thigh pressed against his, the smell of her vanilla lipgloss coating his suddenly dry throat). A month into the summer they were going to movies and bookstores and coffee shops together and three weeks before she went back to school Danielle had her ultimate success when, awkwardly saying goodbye at her door after a poetry slam, he leaned across and kissed her.

The rest, as they say, is history. He'd followed her to her college that spring for graduate school, they'd moved in together, she'd applied for her Masters at the same university he'd chosen for his PhD, they'd gotten married and a baby made three.

***

Danielle somehow hears the door closing behind Angela over the din, and she looks up with a grin before tucking her screaming baby up under her shirt. After that Patty and Graham come out to greet her, their voices loud in the sudden silence. There's a bowl of soup, and a taste of Graham's newest cranberry sauce recipe (it needs a tad more horseradish, in Angela's opinion), acres and acres of celery to chop and lots of slightly awkward conversation (none of the Chases are quite adjusted to Brian Krakow being part of the family, and her parents don't really understand the choices Angela's made in the eight years since all her plans were thrown out the window). Then Angela has brushed her teeth, sharing the sink with her sister, and changed into the ragged old t-shirt she brought from home ("It's Noah's" Angela bites out in response to her mother's offer to get her a "nice new nightgown, dear," and her parents exchange a sad, worried look while the conversation breathes its last gap on the floor) and she's lying between the cold sheets of her childhood bed, almost thirty and wondering what happened to her life.

* * *

_Thank you so much to my reviewers! It was really amazing to get this outpouring of support, please keep it up. To those that commented, I did want to try something a little different from the norm, with Angela not pining after Jordan. She's actually had a pretty full life without him, but as you can probably tell things have started to stagnate for her... which is why he's going to make an in person appearance in the next chapter._

_The cranberry sauce Graham is making belongs to Susan Stamberg's mother-in-law, my mom heard it on NPR, where Susan has been reading it every year since 1971, and it's absolutely delicious. You should look it up._


	3. Parade

_I kind of stopped writing this story a while ago (I was planning it out and trying to give it a plot, which is the reason I usually write vignettes) but then I was reading you guys' reviews, and I decided to start posting the stuff I already have written, and MAYBE even start writing more. So, here's "chapter" 3 of ?_

* * *

In the morning, Angela holds her adorable (and for once quiet) niece on her lap and watches the parade while Danielle and Brian shower and dress. Tactfully, no one mentions how long it takes them, or the thumps coming from the bathroom, or the love-bite half showing above the neckline of Danielle's shirt. Angela does look at it pointedly, however, and Danielle laughs before reclaiming her daughter for the first feeding of the day.

"Am I the only one who knows how to cook?" Graham hollers while Angela is finishing her third cup of coffee (lots of cream, no sugar), and everyone troops dutifully into the kitchen to stir and chop and peel. By noon it's so hot that Angela can feel sweat runnelling between her breasts. Graham's in his element and Patty's watching him from over the potatoes with fond amusement, but in the living room Lillian won't stop screaming and Angela's starting to get a headache.

"I've changed her diaper and fed her and burped her and rocked her and I don't know what else to DO!" Danielle practically shrieks in response to her sister's query. "Sometimes when she's like this she calms down if I take her for a drive" she continues in a quieter tone, and then she glances up towards the bedroom where she'd stolen away to work on her thesis forty-five minutes ago. Brian, Angela knows, is on the phone with his parents.

From the kitchen Graham shouts that he's run out of walnuts and Angela makes a split second decision, grabbing her keys, her coat, and the squalling baby before hightailing it out of the house.

It's cold in the car but the heat will kick in soon enough and by the time Angela's halfway down the block Lillian has fallen silent, gazing out from her bassinet with big amber eyes. At the grocery store the parking lot is nearly empty and she thinks everything's going perfectly as she parks right in front. Then she spots the sign on the door, saying that the store closed twenty minutes ago.

She's pulling into the sixth gas station (why don't any of them carry plain walnuts?) when she sees the car. It's a red convertible, sleek and shiny; maybe because of what she heard on the radio yesterday, Angela thinks of Jordan.

At last! There are bags of unroasted, unsalted walnuts right below the sunflower seeds and she grabs four (they're kind of small), struggling to juggle them with one hand while she holds Lillian's bassinet in the other. At the front of the store a man in a black leather coat (the owner of the convertible? a part of her mind muses) finishes paying for his bag of marshmallows and turns around.

"Hey," Jordan Catalano says, his first words to Angela Chase in thirteen years.

* * *

_Does anyone remember, or have the resources to look up, the name of Uncle Neil's long term on/off girlfriend? Right now I'm going with "Moira" but I'm not sure that was it._


End file.
